It is known that patients affected by kidney failure need to be periodically treated in order to eliminate excess of water and in order to reinstate the proper acid-base and electrolyte equilibrium in blood. These patients may be treated using extracorporeal blood treatment machines which are designed to withdraw blood from a patient, treat the blood and then return the treated blood to the patient.
On occasion of each treatment, a blood treatment machine is properly configured with the disposable components (such as the tubing lines, the hemofilter or dialyzer, the concentrates); then, after few start-up phases, normally including priming of the extracorporeal circuit, a patient's cardiovascular system is connected with the extracorporeal circuit of the blood treatment machine and a number of parameters relating to operation of the machine or to the treatment to be delivered to the patient are set, typically before starting the treatment. Furthermore, in the course of the treatment, a multiplicity of sensors captures the values of a number of sensed parameters which are kept under surveillance. In conclusion, considering that each patient receives 3 or 4 dialysis sessions per week, a relevant number of information is captured and stored on a weekly basis. It should also be noted that patients are often submitted to blood sampling and testing at laboratory units in order to measure concentration of certain substances in blood, which may serve to understand the health status of the patient. In this situation, a huge amount of data is continuously collected for each patient.
It is known to centralize and to make available in specialized clinical information systems the medical status and the dialysis prescription of the patients. In other words, all collected information is kept in databases and a medical doctor willing to have the full picture of a patient may need to consult a huge number of parameter values coming at different moments and from different sources with no possibility to correlate the various parameters to a meaningful clinical picture. This large amount of information may render basically impossible to a medical doctor efficiently identifying relevant information and to correlate certain information with risks to have or contract certain pathologies. Even more difficult is correlating relevant data of one patient with those of other patients: the status of a patient population of a dialysis center is not made available to the medical doctor in a fast and consistent way. To the contrary, data which may refer to a same aspect of the dialysis treatment or of the patient are often scattered in several files, papers and databases. Thus the medical doctor cannot have an overview of the quality of care delivered to his patients and cannot take prompt action at an early stage.